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[nkarafo]

Remember the Genesis? It used dithering to blend it to fake colors and transparencies on old TVs using composite.

Remember the Saturn? And how it also used dithering because it was hard to program real transparencies because of a hardware limitation?

It's good that modern systems have no such limitations eh?

So why this?

A lot of Nintendo games seem to use this effect lately but other devs use it to dither things that get in the way of the camera, mostly foliage, for example The Witcher 3:

I remember playing a bunch of newer games where this happens, especially in stealth sections where you hide behind stuff and that stuff gets dithered.... But i don't remember the titles at the moment.

My point is.... Why even use this archaic technique on modern games? We used to get real transparencies for this effect so what happened?

 

[The Cockatrice]

A useful annoyance.

 

[RoboFu]

its in almost every games as its still a very good way to optimize. Like the examples above it's still SEMI transparent but it's only drawing half the pixels.

 

[cireza]

Looks like absolute poop and should not exist in video-games nowadays. It is extremely distracting, and it is everywhere in Switch games.

 

[nkarafo]

its in almost every games as its still a very good way to optimize. Like the examples above it's still SEMI transparent but it's only drawing half the pixels.

It looks ugly and distracting. Why not real transparency like before?

 

[RoboFu]

It looks ugly and distracting. Why not real transparency like before?

it only has to draw and calculate HALF the transparent pixels. transparency has to be calculated for each pixel.

 

[Calverz]

Just play it on a crt and you won't see the dithering.

 

[SJRB]

Ugly as sin.

 

[Thief1987]

Yeah it looks awful but it's an optimisation for the transparency so if devs don't have other ways they are kinda forced to use this

 

[Physiognomonics]

Just play it on a crt and you won't see the dithering.

back on crt tvs there was a point on using it.

 

[RAIDEN1]

Just play it on a crt and you won't see the dithering.

So I guess that's why it wasn't a big thing in the hey-day of the Genesis and Saturn, where as when you looked at something like the 3DO and SNES they never had such issues...

 

[Portugeezer]

The DK example doesn't look like transparency at all.

 

[DaciaJC]

Yeah, it looks awful.

 

[Skifi28]

Some games that use reconstruction have such low internal resolutions that the entire image is dithered. How developers think this is absolutely fine to ship is beyond me.

 

[Bodom78]

back on crt tvs there was a point on using it.

And there is a point to using it now,, as mentioned above it's an optimization technique.

 

[AJUMP23]

Dither me timbers these colors be blending.

 

[Loomy]

It looks ugly and distracting. Why not real transparency like before?

That is way more resource intensive.

 

[nkarafo]

it only has to draw and calculate HALF the transparent pixels. transparency has to be calculated for each pixel.

That is way more resource intensive.

So older systems were fine but modern ones can't handle it?

 

[th4tguy]

It's an easy way to get some additional performance out of the engine. That's all it comes down to.
Transparencies can still be pretty expensive, especially when there are a lot on screen. This isn't a "once was expensive but now isn't" feature. It's cost scales with the complexity of what is on screen and how many pixels are being rendered. Todays hardware is much more capable of handling it today but it's still something that can cause issues if not optimized well.

 

[cireza]

That is way more resource intensive.

Older consoles could do this perfectly, yet newer consoles are more powerful but developers don't use it.

So basically :
- engines are shit and waste resources
- we don't know how to optimize anymore
- priorities concerning picture quality are wrong
- we don't give a shit lol
- all of these

 

[RoboFu]

So older systems were fine but modern ones can't handle it?

older systems were 320 x 240 and 640 x 480 with specific hardware for doing transparency a specific way . like the snes doesn't do true transparency like modern gpus. it uses two buffers and very limited blending math function.

GPUS do it how you would think it works in your head by drawing on top of previously drawn pixel and calculating the resulting color for each pixel. at 1080p up to 4k that's a lot of calculations for each pixel.

 

[Wildebeest]

For a lot of modern games they expect you to use TAA, AI upscaling, or whatever, to smear away the artefacts.

 

[Holammer]

Necessary evil, as it improves framerate.
No surprise most of the examples given are Nintendo.

 

[analog_future]

Yeah you're the only one. Everyone else loves it

 

[Imtjnotu]

Forspoken had one of the worse uses I've seen ever on foliage and particles.

 

[winjer]

It has become common in recent times due to devs rellying on temporal solutions, to hide it.
Dithering does improve frame rates.
With proper temporal upscalers, like DLSS4 and FSR4, it's barely unnoticeable.
But without these techniques, it becomes a sore sight.

 

[Xeela_sunston]

Proper noise shaped dither can be a very potent trick If for compression reasons. Go encode LossyWAV FLAC at 384kbps with It advanced noise shaping dither model, That 4-bit lossless audio at 44.1KHz performing just like 16-bit audio. It being True VBR allows more bits when needed.

 

[Doctor Hades]

I agree that dithering can be annoying to see, especially on something like the PC or PS5 Pro, but it is a performance saving measure as alpha transparencies are very demanding, especially useful on very bandwidth limited hardware like the Switch 2. Donkey Kong Bananza is already pushing the CPU hard with the destructible enivonments and has performance issues so using alpha transparencies as well would have been a recipe for disaster in my opinion. The dithering is an okay compromise and one I can live with.

 

[Ulysses 31]

To my understanding it's often used instead transparent textures since the latter can tank performance in a lot of cases.

 

[Signalis]

Forspoken had one of the worse uses I've seen ever on foliage and particles.

Very true, but that was the least of Forespoken's problems

 

[Elfstar]

Very nostalgic for a Saturn fan

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

Thanks for telling me what technique it is... I hate it too, especially if it focuses on the characters.

 

[pachura]

 

[Zacfoldor]

It looks ugly and distracting. Why not real transparency like before?

Older consoles could do this perfectly, yet newer consoles are more powerful but developers don't use it.

So basically :
- engines are shit and waste resources
- we don't know how to optimize anymore
- priorities concerning picture quality are wrong
- we don't give a shit lol
- all of these

What do you not understand about this?

Many people immediately told everyone it was an optimization issue.

You start talking about older consoles, maybe you don't know what optimization is?

Optimization is making the best use out of limited resources. The less important facets will get less resources. Why could older consoles do it? The games weren't pushing the hardware to the level it needed optimization or modern optimization options weren't available or transparency was a much smaller potion of the game and they didn't mind the performance hit, it varies by game and each game must make those decisions in order to provide the best experience. The switch very much is often fps/performance limited.

Optimization - the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource.

Many of the games listed are Nintendo games. You think Nintendo out of fall companies on earth, don't know how to optimize for switch?

Dude, okay, so understand this. Once the game gets to the final stages they must then optimize it. The DK game has a LOT of transparency because you basically drill underground, right? If the game is getting bad drops when they have full on transparency but they can stop the drops when they use dithering, do you still think dithering is a sign of BAD optimization or GOOD optimization? Would you rather have real transparency with drops or no drops and dithering? Is your hate for dithering worse than your hate for a suboptimal frame rate? As you can see the game already struggles with frame rate, so if you traded out dithering for real transparency that would get worse, would it not? Do you see now how this is optimization?

 

[Jinzo Prime]

I lot of modern games use deferred rendering which allows for more lights in a scene at the same performance cost, but cannot handle transparency, which has to be forward-rendered.

 

[Closer]

It's the worst when used in hair rendering.

 

[Robb]

Not really. I've never really thought about it/been annoyed by it when playing.

 

[TintoConCasera]

It's total shit, yeah, and it pains me to see people defending it.

"Optimization bro". Nah fuck that, if the game was properly optimized in the first place it should be able to render proper transparencies.

 

[cireza]

Why could older consoles do it? The games weren't pushing the hardware to the level it needed optimization

Being a developer on 8 bits consoles myself I find this rather hilarious. Old consoles were 100% about optimization. It was about getting the most out of everything you had at your disposal, and wasting resources was the last thing you would do.

More than bad optimization, it is probably bad design and wrong priorities. If you know that in your game, you are going to constantly have the view hidden by walls, you make it a high priority to have these walls properly transparent so that the player is not constantly distracted by these ugly grids.

 

[mèx]

Dithered transparencies are much cheaper to compute than normal alpha blending when using deferred rendering. TAA should theoretically "clean up" (aka smear) the dithered pattern so it should appear properly transparent.

In reality it looks like shit.

 

[Lethal01]

Remember the Genesis? It used dithering to blend it to fake colors and transparencies on old TVs using composite.

Remember the Saturn? And how it also used dithering because it was hard to program real transparencies because of a hardware limitation?

It's good that modern systems have no such limitations eh?

So why this?

A lot of Nintendo games seem to use this effect lately but other devs use it to dither things that get in the way of the camera, mostly foliage, for example The Witcher 3:

I remember playing a bunch of newer games where this happens, especially in stealth sections where you hide behind stuff and that stuff gets dithered.... But i don't remember the titles at the moment.

My point is.... Why even use this archaic technique on modern games? We used to get real transparencies for this effect so what happened?

I love how the dithering effect looks in stylized games

 

[Radical_3d]

Saturn lost a whole generation because of this. I switched to PS and now it's everywhere.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Beyond optimization using dithering (stencil hatching) to provide transparency also reduces rendering complexity compared to alpha transparency that needs pre-sorted with every camera change and the hatching also makes it easier to control the amount the transparency impacts the colour of the higher translucent objects.

Using alpha transparency can cause the underlying objects and higher objects to inadvertently change shades or visibility and not as intended; especially under varied lighting under different camera positioning making it much harder for the scene designer to guarantee the scene composition for the gamer, even with extensive testing.

By comparison stencil hatching guarantees that the top/highest level will always show the opaque stencil hatching pattern of the top object in its normal solid colours, and the exclusive difference of the highest and second highest layer hatched pixels in their full colours for the layer 2 object, etc and so on.

 

[zeroluck]

In the age of chatgpt you could just ask it to compare dithered transparency to other transparency techniques for real time rendering, you will see why it is used.

 

[simpatico]

Made the mistake of playing some Crysis 3 last weekend. I'm sorry I ever gave any time to the people who earnestly argue that graphics are not getting worse. Between it, UC4, Red Dead, Driveclub, Control, shit Half Life fucking 2, we're cooked guys. Simply cooked. If you built a collection of only games WITHOUT ray tracing, what are you even missing? Which classics won't you have access to? "But what about the nanite rock piles man? The rock piles in those games don't come close".

Been going back through Splinter Cell Blacklist as well. Totally holds up. Looks and gameplay. If it released this year, it would immediately be a strong GOTY contender.

 

[nkarafo]

In the age of chatgpt you could just ask it to compare dithered transparency to other transparency techniques for real time rendering, you will see why it is used.

I prefer asking real people for now.

 

[bender]

Someone linked this video a day or two ago. If you can get past the awkward enunciation of the Youtuber, it's an interesting watch.

 

[Dacvak]

Just play without wearing your glasses

 

[Vaquilla]

Transparencies eat up bandwidth, and on systems like Switch 1 and 2 bandwidth is constrained due to their portable nature.

The alternative would be the framerate crashing down every time smoke or leaves or other alpha covers up a large portion of the screen.

 

[kevboard]

So older systems were fine but modern ones can't handle it?

interestingly yes.

the PS2 was so good at layering transparencies on top of transparencies that porting games to other systems could be problematic.
the Xbox version of MGS2 runs worse than the PS2 version, despite the Xbox's GPU being more than 3 times as powerful in raw compute numbers... and the reason were transparency effects like rain and layered textures.
japanese devs struggled with the PS360 gen for similar reasons. they were used to just layering transparent layers on top of eachother, which worked on PS2, but completely destroyed perfomance on PS3 and 360.

the way many engines do transparent effects now btw is to use dithering and then smear the image to make it look transparent... yes, just like the fucking MegaDrive did but now they do it through TAA instead of the CRT blur.
that's why many modern unreal engine games look broken if you turn off TAA, and why they usually don't let you.

Nintendo usually doesn't use TAA, and so they can't just smear the image to hide when they do perfomance saving measures like dithering. but in return you get a cleaner image that isn't butchered by TAA blur, TAA artifacts, and TAA motion trails